Complex systems, such as modern aircrafts, can involve hundreds of miles of wiring. Wires are used to distribute power and data to various types of electrical equipment. These connections are accomplished by terminating groups of wires together with a plug which mates with a receptacle or jack in the equipment. The electrical contacts (pins or sockets) in the plug will match the contacts in the jack. It is critical to the safety and performance of the system that the correct wires be connected to the correct contacts in the plug. Furthermore, when trouble shooting a wiring problem, the user must understand how each signal corresponds to each contact in a plug. The same plug part can be used many different times in a system for many different purposes and there is no inherent function associated with a contact. Because plugs can have over a hundred contacts, this can be a daunting task and users use plug maps to aid in this analysis.
The same plug part can be used many different times in a system for many different purposes and there is no inherent function associated with a contact.
Currently, maintenance users look up information to find correspondences among contacts and wires on wiring diagrams, wire lists, plug maps, equipment lists, part lists, etc. This data exists in manuals and tables including thousands of pages for a single aircraft. Finding the relationships among the various data sources is tedious and error-prone. Even when this data is migrated from paper-based documents to digital data, these problems still exist. There is a need for tools to establish the relationships among this data and efficiently present the information to the maintenance users.
This information can be added to a system manually, however it is cost-prohibitive and error-prone. There is a system that can automatically generate plug maps for the purpose of generating paper diagrams, but it does not automatically create intelligent diagrams that automatically link to associated wiring information.
In order to fully understand a system, it is important to integrate the views provided by plug maps with other graphic and tabular data such as locator views, wire lists and schematic diagrams. For example, when trouble shooting a problem, the user might begin with a locator graphic which focuses attention on a specific plug. Using existing plug maps, the user would then have to browse through the library of plug maps looking for the correct plug map. For plugs with many contacts, it is easy to select the wrong plug map by mistake. Once the correct plug map is found, the user faces the difficult task of linking individual contacts to specific wires in wiring diagrams.
While existing devices suit their intended purpose, there remains a need for a system that can generate plug maps and automatically creates intelligent diagrams that automatically links to associated wiring information.